My father, the bearded mycologist, must have been more metrosexual than I ever realised, for it was he who first pushed Mary Stewart my way, handing the 12-year-old me her 1956 novel Wildfire at Midnight – in which a model called Gianetta Drury tries and singularly fails to enjoy a quiet holiday on the Isle of Skye – with the words: “You will like this.”

And he was right, of course – Stewart was, and doubtless still is, perfect reading for an almost teenage girl – and after that I bashed my way through most of her best stories: The Gabriel Hounds, a mystery set in a crumbling Lebanese palace owned by a reclusive Englishwoman called Lady Harriet; Thunder on the Right, starring an artist called Jennifer Silver, who must try to discover whether her novice cousin really did die in a car crash somewhere in the French Pyrenees; The Ivy Tree, a thriller about a supposedly dead girl who returns to a house in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall. Tales of romantic suspense with plucky heroines and frequently glamorous locations … even now I can’t help buying up old copies in secondhand bookshops. How I love the backcombed hair and sack dresses in which the heroines are inevitably pictured.

Stewart died in 2014, at the age of 97, her brilliant stories all still in print. Two years on, however, her publisher, Hodder, has found a “long lost novella”, The Wind Off the Small Isles, which it is putting between hard covers later this month. Personally, I think the rather grand term “novella” might be pushing it a bit. To me, The Wind Off the Small Isles reads more like a story from a women’s magazine; by Stewart’s high standards, it’s just a little pat, and at fewer than 70 pages, I dispatched it on a train between London and Stoke with time to spare. But for the fan I guess it’s still a pleasing find.

A pert young secretary, Perdita West, and her sometimes tricky employer, the novelist Cora Gresham, travel to Lanzarote on a research trip. There, Perdita meets a gorgeous man, gets stuck in an underwater cave, and solves a century-old mystery. What’s not to like?